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Karen Rivers, author of The Girl In the Well Is Me brings to life Mischa “Ish” Love a girl who believes in her heart that she will be one of the first inhabitants of Mars. She lives and breathes outer space – what she’ll wear, what she’ll eat, what she’ll miss on Earth, what she won’t miss on Earth and all the planning she does to be ready for when the day arrives.

But as a middle school student, Ish’s plans make her out to be weird and now that her best friend Tig moved away, she’s all by herself. Ish’s first day of seventh grade doesn’t go as planned when she collapses on the playground after lunch and her diagnosis threatens the only dream she has ever had.

I liked Ish as a character because she’s a very believable middle school kid – worried about sister issues, quirky and different and believes in a future regardless of how unattainable it might be. I felt that there was a little too much happening in the background of the story that detracted a little from the focus – her best friend moved away, Ish’s parents reveal something that rocks Ish and her sister to the core and a new kid makes fun of her in the few short hours that she attends school. All of these parts put together bring something to the story, but I felt a little bogged down with all of these “problems” when there was much bigger problem with a capital “P” that Ish and her family were dealing with.

Overall, I enjoyed the story and as the back of the cover states if you’re a fan of Fish In a Tree and The Thing About Jellyfish, you’ll definitely want to pick this one up!

Twitter Booktalk (140 characters or less): 7th grader, Ish solely wants to be an inhabitant on Mars, but a diagnosis proves Mars is much further than the 139,808,518 miles she thought